maunderings of a meandering mind

Murphy was out in full force on sysadmin project today. So far the results are

• Old Somerville wiring flakieness: 3
• Powerline Ethernet: 1

(And that one was a gimme: I deliberately ran my first test within a room — but only later realized I'd accidentally connected both units to extension cords on the same outlet.) I have another approach to troubleshooting it to try tomorrow, but I expect I'm going to end up running about 100 feet of ethernet cable. (I've been trying to avoid that, because the labor involved in doing it right in this house would be immense, and I really didn't want to do a half-assed job. But at this point I just a working wired connection betwen upstairs and downstairs, and it doesn't need to be pretty: It just needs to work.

Tomorrow:

• find & apply for at least one job
  
• ≥ 1 hr focused reading
  
• check on printer progress
  
• make network happen between floors at home
  • Don't try to make it pretty.
  • Just make it work.
• Go to Waltham storage?
  
• ≥ 1 hr getting to know my new calculator

Yay! I got everything on this morning's todo list done! The first of what I intend will be many such days!

The temp agency job interview went, I think, quite well. I was comfortable and at ease, and clearly made a good impression on all three interviewers. I told them that the main thing I'm looking for, initially, is something to get me back into the swing of going to an office for regular working hours five days a week, after five years of working out of a home office. And I left feeling like they'll come up with a way to provide me with that in fairly short order.

Not on the list, but should have been, was to exercise. Which I did.

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This post is going out about an hour (I think) earlier than the past few days'. The neighborhood birds woke me up at 5:20 this morning. I wasted about 40 minutes trying to fight the inevitable, so only got up at 6:00. Thing is, I like early mornings. And now I'm dog tired. So I'm going to take a shot at getting to bed by 11:00, with the intention of getting up by 5:30. Emacs says sunrise is at 5:15, so hopefully the birds won't burst into song too much earlier.

• Contacted a temp agency, and I have an interview first thing tomorrow.
  
• Turns out there isn't a Weds. Downtown Crossing WIND meeting anymore. Nor any meetings closer than Watertown - the next one of which is on my calendar.
  
• Insufficient progress on learning Omnifocus; calling this one a fail.
  
• Applied for an IT manager job a recruiter posted on dice.com. Fingers crossed!
  
• Made a significant dent in my open browser windows and tabs, but not as extreme as I set out to. Which is probably a good thing: I now have four windows; the tabs in each window are all on the same theme:
  • Active current projects
  • Current shopping projects
  • Job Hunting
  • Personal
  I think this is potentially a really sensible scheme, and I'm going to try to maintain it til I actually decide otherwise. No drifting back into a dozen windows, each with a bunch of arbitrary tabs.
  
• Got in a good walk, long and vigorous enough to count toward my exercise goals. And three shorter walks that got me good and winded.

Over all, a good day.

Of the six items in this morning's todo, I failed on one: "Contact at least one temp agency, and schedule an interview." I'd planned to do it in the afternoon. Having my stitches removed turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than I'd expected — and took a hell of a lot more out of me. I'd expected it to be quick and essentially painless, as removing the stitches from my forehead had been. Instead, each stitch seemed to take a fair bit of effort; most were quite sharply painful, and I bled rather more than the few droplets I'd expected. By the time I got home, I was feeling pretty wiped, so I took a nap. Without imagining I'd nap for more than an hour, and therefore without setting an alarm. Nearly four hours later — just past 5:00 — I woke up.

Calling temp agencies will be my first business-hours priority tomorrow.

I'm going to call this not bad for my first day trying to abide by a todo list. But I'm not asking a ridiculous amount of myself, and I really ought to be able to do 100%.

Tomorrow's another day.

Yesterday was my birthday, and I spent a lot of it thinking about where my life is and where I want it to be. One consequence of that thinking is that from now on, I intend to post each morning and evening, under the todo tag: in the morning, things I want to get done that day; in the evening, notes on what I did. You're only getting an evening post today, because I didn't settle on this plan til a few hours ago.

Since my fall a couple weeks ago, I stopped my exercise schedule, which had for several weeks been at least seven 15+ minute periods in my aerobic range per week, to be done on at least five different days. Even walking was painful after that fall — it pulled on the scars and made them bleed.

I realized yesterday that, especially in combination with the tendency to sleep too much the healing has entailed, has had a really crappy effect on my mood. So one of my todo items for today was to get started on that again.

I took a 15 min walk at an average pulse of 120, and a 21 min walk at 122. So I think that's a ringing success.

The one thing that was specifically on my calendar today was a genius bar appointment at the Apple Store. That happened; my problem was happily resolved, and I had a nice talk with the guy at the genius bar. Which leads to my next point:

Another thing I decided yesterday was that I need to be trying to apply for at least one job — any remotely reasonable job — every day, instead of waiting for a great job to somehow fall into my lap. So as we were finishing up, I said, "So, switching gears here, do you guys have any openings?"

So I've just finished submitting my application for a genius bar position at the Cambridgeside store. It is a vastly lower-level position than I've held in something like fifteen years. But, damn it would be good to have a regular gig again. And, as a dear friend pointed out to me yesterday, while I'm unlikely to be hired by people who don't know me into as senior a position as I'm used to, I am highly likely to be promoted into such a position by people who've seen my work. So here's hoping.